


The Kind of Stuff We're Trying to Save

by dreamycastaway



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Body Image, Chubby!Aziraphale, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 12:42:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamycastaway/pseuds/dreamycastaway
Summary: “Aziraphale? What happened to you?”“Ah. I, ah, ran into Gabriel in the park today.”“And?”“Well, he told me to wrap up everything down here and report back to active service. And to, um, ‘lose the gut.’”





	The Kind of Stuff We're Trying to Save

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick body positive Ineffable Husbands fic in which Crowley reassures Aziraphale after Gabriel is a wanker. This is supposed to happen at the point in the show where Crowley says "Whatever I said I didn't mean it" instead of that brief scene on the street. Presumably the fighting still happens afterwards but this is just outright fluff/comfort.

“Aziraphale? Aziraphale, come on!” Crowley knocked again on the door to Aziraphale’s apartments above the bookshop, as hard as he dared to. His deepest desire was to tear the door of its hinges and march in there and … well. But Aziraphale would surely say something like “Crowley! That door dates back to the eighteenth century! It’s original to the building!” in that indignant little voice. So Crowley just knocked. 

“Aziraphale, I’ve … I’ve come to apologize.” Crowley admitted sheepishly. He waited. He listened, hoping to hear Aziraphale walking towards the door, or else call out “coming!” from the other room. But he heard neither of these things, and was forced by his awareness of his looming ass-kicking from head office to turn away. Just as he reached the stairwell, he heard the old hinges creak.

Crowley looked back, and was surprised to see no one in the doorway who could have opened it. 

“Aziraphale? Listen, Aziraphale, I’m –” Crowley said hesitantly as he crossed the threshold. He stopped in his tracks when he caught sight of the other man, who was making the appearance of doing something but really doing nothing at all, and had clearly miracled the door open. “Aziraphale? What happened to you?” 

Aziraphale stopped pretending to be busy and looked up at Crowley, seemingly unable to muster even the weakest of smiles. “Ah. I, ah, ran into Gabriel in the park today.” His voice was a mix of ‘I’m talking fast because I have to get somewhere, thanks’ and ‘I’m talking fast because I’m embarrassed.’ Crowley wasn’t sure which upset him more. 

Crowley rolled his eyes behind his shades at the mention of Gabriel. If he thought Beelzebub was bad … well. Gabriel was definitely worse. Crowley had spent many unrestful nights and drunken afternoons regretting his fall, but any mention of Gabriel was usually enough to put him off the regret for a few days. 

“And?” Crowley said, trying his very best to maintain neutral-cool and swallow his concerns, about Armageddon, about Beelzebub, about the Anti-Christ, all of which were clamoring for his attention like so many needy children who were quite upset that once again Aziraphale had seemed to land squarely at the top of the ‘things Crowley worries about’ list. 

“Well, he told me to wrap up everything down here and report back to active service.” Aziraphale paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to continue speaking. “And to, um, ‘lose the gut.’” 

To say that ‘the gears in Crowley’s head were turning’ would have been an understatement. Really, the gears in Crowley’s head were spinning off their pegs and dowels and ricocheting around in his brain, setting off alarm bells and sirens. His mind was immediately so full of questions it is almost not worthwhile to list them all out, but rest assured they included “who does Gabriel think he is” and “is Aziraphale actually going to report to active duty” and “did he really listen to Gabriel about the gut?”

Crowley answered the last question himself as he realized that when he had asked earlier “what happened to you” he hadn’t been quite sure to what he was referring; he just knew that something was wrong. Now he knew what was wrong – Aziraphale had changed out his normal tartan bowtie and playful waistcoat for the very bland, standard-issue clothes he had been sent down in … and those clothes _fit him_. When he said “what happened to you” he really should have said “what happened to the rest of you” – if not for his keen awareness of what Aziraphale smelled like and how he carried himself and the expressiveness in those grey eyes (and for the fact of them being in Aziraphale’s flat) he might not have recognized him at all. 

Aziraphale _liked_ food. In fact, if one wasn’t aware of how deeply the angel loved certain other things, and how much nothing could come close to his love of those certain things, one might say Aziraphale _loved_ food. He thought it was adorable that humans turned a survival instinct into an art, and found it quite heartwarming that they created masterpieces knowing full well that those masterpieces would only serve their purpose if they were destroyed. He had absolutely gone native when it came to eating – in fact, he was at risk of going beyond that point. A first-edition of _The Hobbit_ had come into his possession sometime back, and he thought that the idea of seven daily meals was quite brilliant. 

It’s not as if Aziraphale’s body could fail him, and, quite frankly, Aziraphale was too clever to believe the nonsense that one’s weight actually had much to do with one’s health as opposed to with one’s genetics. But since Aziraphale didn’t have any genetics to speak of, his weight had not much to do with his genes and quite a lot to do with his passion for food. He loved food and his body knew it, and it wanted to show it off. 

That is, until this morning, when Gabriel had told him to “lose the gut.” Gabriel, always a man of few, blunt words, arguably an American before America had even existed, had felt no need to sugarcoat, and what “lose the gut” suggested to Aziraphale was that this soft, comfortable, lived-in body was not fit for an angel who was about to be fighting in a war, and that Aziraphale had better quickly hide any evidence of his gross matter consumption habit before Gabriel invented a new boot camp regimen for angels who have clearly let themselves go. 

“I’m … too soft.” He admitted weakly to Crowley. 

At some point Crowley’s head had stopped spinning and he had taken his shades off, which was his way of saying “I’ve decided what’s important to me in this moment and that’s what I’m about to address”. Obviously those exact words would never cross the demon’s lips, but Aziraphale knew what it meant for him to take his glasses off, and he waited, looking awkward and upset in his changed body and his old clothes, but bringing to bear that tender patience and resolve that Crowley admired so much.

Although Crowley had decided what he was going to address he wasn’t quite sure how to go about saying it. Just as healing and poisoning were very similar skillsets, applied in vastly different situations, knowing what to say to push someone over the edge into darkness and knowing what to say to coax someone back into the light were two sides of the same coin. In Crowley’s particular line of work, the former was obviously more common, and his knowledge of the latter was typically waved away with a “well, I’ve got to know what not to say, don’t I? Wouldn’t want to go around making saints instead of sinners,” but just as Crowley occasionally made plays into startling successes and saved books from two-timing Nazis, he occasionally said something kind. 

“Well, soft is good, isn’t it, Angel?” 

To anyone not aware of the specific infernal nature of Crowley, the word ‘good’ would sit firmly between ‘fine’ and ‘great,’ and maybe even seem a little underwhelming, given everything that was afoot. But the in-the-know onlooker would understand that for a demon to use the word good, and to actually mean it, rather than to scorn it, carried with it such immense weight that both Crowley and Aziraphale felt they had to hold their breath for a minute, lest that weight come crashing down on top of them. Crowley typically tried to slither his way out of the word “good”, but in this instance he used it just as it was meant to be used. Soft was good. He liked soft. Aziraphale liked soft. 

Moreover, to anyone not aware of the specific celestial nature of Aziraphale, Crowley’s nickname for him would seem unabashedly romantic. In his warmer moments, Aziraphale, who was very familiar with the written word, would agree, saying that he could hear the capital A on Angel. In his more uncertain moments he was inclined to hear it as something of an insult, much as it would be to call your plumber “plumber”, given that you were of a profession that had a 6,000-year-long feud with plumbers, and had once been a plumber yourself and perhaps were jealous you were no longer one. Even though Aziraphale was full of uncertainty in this moment, somehow none of it landed on that word, and he was aware that by “soft is good, isn’t it, Angel?” Crowley really meant “your body only looks the way you want it to. It shows what it loves and what you love. And that’s good, Angel, you don’t have to be what they say. You can be what you say.” 

Just as how Gabriel had said three words to Aziraphale this morning and Aziraphale had heard fifty-one, Crowley said seven words and Aziraphale heard thirty-seven. Crowley, of course, knew that Aziraphale would hear all thirty-seven words without him having to say them all, and he also knew that right about now Aziraphale would be thinking “oh, I suppose that was a question, wasn’t it?” and being the polite man he was, would feel he had to answer, which was exactly what Crowley had planned. 

“Yes, I …” Aziraphale tread lightly – he was perhaps too aware of Crowley’s infernal nature and his own celestial nature and the heavy tension hanging between them and all around them. “I suppose soft has its place.” Aziraphale paused for a moment. “But soft has its place here on Earth. Not among the host of Heaven.” 

Crowley’s first instinct was to lash out, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Aziraphale liked to take things slow, and an outburst would certainly put him off the rest of the conversation. Instead, Crowley paused, and, in an off-brand move, considered carefully what he was going to say next. “Angel, isn’t that the _point_ of all this?” He threw his arms up and gestured vaguely at himself and Aziraphale and their surroundings. “Aren’t we trying to save all that kind of stuff?” 

By “that kind of stuff” Crowley could have meant any or all of the following: things that were nice about Earth, things that relied on the consumption of food, things that he loved dearly about Aziraphale, things that they had grown accustomed to in their thousands of years here. He didn’t particularly care which meaning the angel took from his vague phrasing, as all of them were accurate and all would get the point across. 

The demon held his breath and looked vaguely around the room as he waited to see if invoking the potential end of the world had been the right decision. If it hadn’t been, they might very well not save the world at all, which would make Crowley deeply upset for a number of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that Hell’s battle fatigues were not stylish at all, and that he would rather die than be on the opposite side from Aziraphale anywhere but at a table for two. 

The meandering of his gaze away from the potential consequences of his actions meant that he missed Aziraphale moving towards him, and was startled to suddenly feel the Angel’s arms wrapped about him in a warm hug. It was not unheard of for the two beings to touch, but it was uncommon enough that Crowley always felt like it had been too long since the last time. Crowley slowly reached his arms up and placed his hands gently on Aziraphale’s back. He could only take a brief moment to enjoy what it felt like to be caught up in the embrace before he realized Aziraphale was crying softly into his shoulder. 

Aziraphale’s tears stung slightly where they landed – they weren’t Holy Water but they were holy and they were water, and thus were like the knock-off handbags of Holy Liquids. But Crowley was much more upset by the fact that Aziraphale was crying at all than the fact that the tears burned him a little, and tried his best to swallow his mounting panic that it was his fault as he asked what was wrong. 

Aziraphale looked up at him, and it was at this point that Crowley realized that he was back to looking like his normal self, being now the usual size and wearing his usual tailored clothes again. The demon breathed a sigh of relief, unable to help a smile from turning up the corners of his mouth – the kind of smile you give someone when they’ve returned to you after a long trip, a mix of relief and longing and pure, unadulterated joy. 

“Well, Darling, I would love to tell you that nothing is wrong, seeing as how nice you’ve just been,” Aziraphale said, lingering on the word ‘nice’ in a way that said ‘I know even you won’t tell me off when I’ve just been crying’. Crowley was barely halfway through forming a grimace at this characterization when he realized he had just been called “Darling”. He looked down in surprise, wondering if maybe he’d misheard something, when he was interrupted by a second realization that Aziraphale hadn’t finished his sentence. He locked eyes with Aziraphale, who was blushing and smiling that mischievous smile that had always set him apart from the other angels. “But as I recall we still have the whole world to save.”


End file.
